


Cross Hairs

by stickylips14



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Background Hance, Blood and Gore, Death, Demon hunting BFFs, Demons, Friendship, Gen, Haunting, Hellrift AU, Horror, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Sort Of, Supernatural Elements, Suspense, Violence, Vomiting, ghost story
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-04
Updated: 2017-09-18
Packaged: 2018-12-23 19:19:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11996307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stickylips14/pseuds/stickylips14
Summary: Garrison is a town full with Hell's run-over. Lance and Keith, childhood friends, have taken up the job of containing it as much as two people can.A haunted house is an old trick, an easy job. But this is different. This truly is hell.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [eugyne (AreteNike)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AreteNike/gifts).



Lance and I collapse into the front seats of my car, trying to catch our breath and figure out if any of our aches and pains are injuries that require more than some ice and a solid night’s sleep. I roll my neck and listen to it crack with a soft groan of satisfaction as the stiffness melts away, though in return I feel a sharp pull in my shoulder instead, hissing under my breath.

“Yo, need me to drive?” Lance asks, sprawled out in the passenger seat and looking pretty damn exhausted. “Your arm is all fucked up.”

“I can drive,” I wave him off and drag myself up into a more upright position, starting the engine and squeezing the steering wheel to numb out the dull, deep throbbing along my left arm. I want a cigarette, but the nicotine hit might make me throw up so instead I just peel out of the parking spot and make for Lance’s apartment, blinking back the sensation of cotton wool replacing my brain. Even two people aren’t really enough to take out a nest of ghouls, but we had managed it and kept all our limbs, so we could count it as a good night. I keep the radio off and across from me, Lance folds his arms and closes his eyes, tucking his chin down against his chest as he gives in to the exhaustion that comes with being a full time student and a part-time demon hunter. I try not to feel too bad about it and instead focus on getting him home safely.

I pull up outside of Lance’s building. He lives across the city from me, near the university he attends, in an apartment only slightly less damp and grimy than my downtown rathole. He shares his place with his long-term friend Hunk because it’s the only way to afford to live in the area, and because the two of them have been casually courting for about as long they’ve known each other. I’m not terribly interested or invested in Lance’s love life, but I figure they’ll realize that they’re into one another eventually, and I’ll be happy for them both.

“Oi,” I reach over and shake Lance by the shoulder. He scowls in his half-asleep state before lifting his head up suddenly. I touch his shoulder a little more lightly and he blinks back his confusion and the low-grade fear the both of us constantly have underpinning nearly every moment of our lives. “This is your stop.”

“Mh, shit. That was quick.” Lance says around a yawn, scrubbing a hand down his face. “Come up, we’ll patch ya up.”

“Hunk hates it when we get blood all over the place.” I point out, but I still cut the engine and Lance grabs his bookbag from the backseat. Unlike my place, Lance’s building has a working elevator which is fantastic at the end of a rough night. We stumble into his small apartment and I kick the door shut behind us. Lance dumps his gear and tries to get the rather pathetic gas heater to actually do its job and raise the room temperature slightly above freezing. I groan, shrugging off my coat, the sleeve tugging on the blood that’s dried over a nasty gash on my forearm. My elbow is swollen and getting harder and harder to bend. Fuck.

“You home, Lance?” Hunk calls from his room, and a moment later he comes out, wrapped in a thick blanket and rubbing sleep out of his eyes. “Oh, hey Keith.”

“Hey man. Did we wake you?” I ask as I flop down onto their lumpy couch, shifting around until I’m something near to comfortable. My ass hurts from a bad landing. Hunk waves me off and crosses over to the kitchen nook where Lance is digging up ice packs from the freezer until he gets shooed away, joining me on the couch. I raise an eyebrow and Lance shrugs.

Hunk has been a gentle giant since the day I met him in middle school. He had moved to the states from Samoa and Lance as an awkward, lanky thirteen year old had enthusiastically dragged the big guy into our weird mash of friends and he never got the chance to leave. Because of that, I try not to cuss and scream while he sets about cleaning up my wounds and strapping up my elbow so I can’t aggravate it further. Lance is much louder about his complaints but Hunk is used to it and affectionately tells him to shut up when he whines too much.

“Yo, you can have my bed tonight.” Lance says at some point after I’ve been cleaned up. I’m half asleep on the couch and it takes a while for me to process what’s being said to me. “I’ll bunk with Hunk, get some sleep.”

I don’t argue about it. Lance helps me to my feet and once I’m in his room I carefully strip out of my jeans and step into a pair of Lance’ sweatpants before climbing into his bed, pulling the blankets right up to my chin. I lie awake for a while, listening to the muffled conversation that’s happening in Hunk’s room. I can’t follow a single word of it, but it’s kind of comforting. Lulls me to sleep.

-

I wake up to the sound of a generic cell phone ringtone screeching from the back pocket of my discarded jeans. Groaning, I roll over onto my side and reach down to grope along the carpet until I find my pants and drag them over. I answer the call, flopping back down into the pillows with a groan.

“What?”

“Keith, have you just woken up? It’s nearly two in the afternoon.” Allura’s pleasant, crisp British accent, all disappointed-big-sister like. I groan again and shove the phone between my cheek and shoulder so I have a free hand to rub at my fucked elbow. The swelling’s gone down a lot, thankfully.

“I had a rough night. What’s up?”

“I have a job for you and Lance, if you both want to take it. It’s small, you might be able to handle it alone, but…”

“Yeah, you’d rather I didn’t.” I sniff and realize to my chagrin, that I’m very awake. I sit up, taking the blanket with me because it’s freezing in this apartment, and shuffle into the living room. “What’s the job? I’ll run it by Lance when he gets home.”

“A haunting in upper east Garrison. There’s been complaints about strange noises, strange smells, the usual sort of thing. Like I said, it’s small, but it needs to be taken care of.”

“Mh, yeah, we can do that. Text me the details.” I say as I try to figure out how to keep the phone against my ear, the blanket around my shoulders and open the fridge. “The ghouls are taken care of, by the way. I’ll swing by at some point to pick up my check.”

“Of course, you know where to find me.” Allura says with a great deal of fondness and I can’t help but smile. “Let me know how it goes, Keith. I’ll talk to you later.”

I say my goodbyes and hang up the phone, tossing it on the counter so I can focus more on rummaging around for food and staying warm. There are a lot of highlights to being Hunk’s friend, and his cooking is pretty high up on the list. I dig out some leftovers and only just manage to find the patience to microwave them before chowing down.

These are weird, rare moments in my life of chaos. It’s like slipping into a liminal space when I get to just sprawl out on a couch with a decent meal and shit TV. Demon hunting, I guess, comes naturally to me. I was born with the innate ability to see all the things that existed on different planes than our own. It was terrifying to me as a child and it has affected every single day of my life, but when Allura scooped me up after dropping out of high school and guided me into using this shitty gift to do some good in the world, I took to it well. Lance is a product of exposure. People born without the sight can definitely gain it. Getting too close, being traumatized by supernatural-related events, will land you in the club.

Lance had been the victim of a rather nasty spirit that fucked up a few months of his life with horrible nightmares and physical aches and pains that didn’t appear to have an explanation. I had crashed at his place one night when my then-foster home had gotten too much, and I took care of it. I dislocated three fingers and there’s probably still my blood in the carpet of Lance’s parents’ house, but Lance’s problem was solved and my secret was out. Lance didn’t handle it well at first, but when I showed up at his place in a pretty bad state some weeks after, something switched over in his head. He signed over his loyalty to me and that was that. Whenever he could, he helped me out.

That was four years ago. He’s in college now, studying to be a marine biologist, and seeing him thrive in school makes me want to shrink back- my work is dangerous _and_ life-consuming. You can never just walk away from it because it follows you around. If you have the ability to see beyond the curtain, then you’re going to garner a lot of interest from the things peeking through from the other side. I don’t want that for Lance. I want him to get out while there’s still a chance of him actually _succeeding_ in getting out. I just don’t know how to broach the subject. It’s not a conversation Lance will ever want to hear- it’d turn into a screaming match and that’s about all. Keeping your best friend safe is hard when your best friend is a stubborn dick.

I get to spend a few hours alone and I do my best to spend that time outside of my own head. Lance is unsurprised to find me on his couch when he gets in. He acknowledges me with a grunt and b-lines for the kitchenette to make coffee. He brings me a cup as well so I give him a cigarette, and we pipe smoke and talk shit for a while. Lance has beef with one of his professors which doesn’t surprise me in the least but I still indulge and make all the right noises while he complains, and when that conversation trails off I dig my phone up from where it had fallen between the couch cushions, pull up Allura’s text and hand it off to Lance. He wiggles his cigarette between his teeth as he reads.

“I don’t have class in the morning, we could get it done tonight.” He says as he passes my phone back. I nod, having already figured that’s what he would say.

-

It’s a lengthy drive all the way out to the suburbs of upper east Garrison. It’s a wealthy area after falling hard to gentrification in something like the early to mid-80s, which is why downtown is so crowded and broke in turn. The houses out here are all damn-near identical and way too big to ever be deemed necessary, even if you had a family of ten. The sky is a dusty shade of orange when my GPS tells me we’ve reached our destination and I park up behind a flash SUV in the driveway of the house that looks mostly the same as the one right next to it, except it has this weird vibe rolling off of it in waves. Something is not right here. In fact, something is really really _wrong_. Lance glances over at me, his eyebrows raised and I rub at my face, heaving a sigh.

We share a cigarette before getting out of the car.

The weight of my bowie knife against the small of my back is comforting but also there’s something totally bizarre about being so heavily armed as I make my way across a perfectly manicured lawn. Lance is right beside me and there is something hard and nervous behind his bright blue eyes. I feel it too.

I take the porch steps two at a time and step lightly the rest of the way up to the front door. I pop the catch on my knife before raising my hand to knock on the door.

Before I even make contact, the door slowly falls open- not entirely, but enough for Lance and I to peek inside; it’s dark and dead silent. Like a void where sound just disappears. My chest feels tight and I glance over at Lance, waiting for him to give me the go-ahead. He nods faintly, and I carefully push the door further open.

It’s freezing inside, cold enough that our breath is visible, little nervous puffs dissipating in the air slowly and it _reeks_ in here _._ A cloying sweet smell permeates through the entire house, the kind of smell that sticks to the back of your throat, and beneath that is something earthy and foul, like rot. My stomach twists while I resist the need to try and identify the smell. From the corner of my eye I see Lance press his nose into the crook of his elbow, and in his other hand his knife is drawn and held tightly. We’re both on edge, then.

“Guess the family ditched?” Lance asks as we move cautiously through the front room and the air swallows up his voice so that he sounds like he’s speaking under water. The atmosphere is so heavy it feels like it’s dragging on my limbs.

“Didn’t think to ask. Must’ve.” I sniff and when we hit the threshold of the hallway I try the lightswitch to my left, but I’m unsurprised to find that nothing happens when I flick it. This place isn’t just haunted, it is halfway submerged into Hell, or whatever it was that spewed shit up into this city. I half expect a thick layer of fog to cover the floor, maybe the faint sound of sirens in the distance. My own nerves are working against me in this situation, adrenaline thrumming through me, making me hyper-aware and jumpy.

Every single door we pass in the hallway falls silently open as we go by it and there’s nothing but black on the other side. I freeze each time, reaching my hand out cautiously into the dark and it feels like putting my hand into the snow- but I can tell, somehow, that there is nothing in there. I’ve always been able to, like a bonus that comes with being able to see the dead. I snatch my hand back quickly, as soon as I have all the information I need, and Lance and I move on in slow, careful steps.

“Keith.” A fist in the back of my hoodie drags me to an immediate halt and Lance’s voice, a sharp whisper, cuts through the suffocatingly dense air. I freeze, full of reluctance to see what has his attention.

Through a large archway just a little ahead is the kitchen and dining hall, less dark than the rest of the house; it’s gloomy, everything in shades of blue and grey, including the family standing stock still in front of the counter, facing towards Lance and I. In the blink of an eye, all of five of them go from staring somewhere beyond us, to all of them tilting their head at the same time, at the same angle, their glassy, milky eyes trained on both of us and their lips pulled into smiles like hooks are dug into the corners of their mouths and are pulling them taut.

They’re dead. They’re all dead; three children, caked in blood, staining down the fronts of their clothes. The mother’s hair is matted with blood that looks black in the lighting and the father stands there with his entrails spilling out onto the hardwood floors. Bile raises up to the back of my throat, struggling to get past my heart which has relocated there. The stench of iron and rot in the air is so fucking overwhelming if I wasn’t so _frozen_ I would vomit.

“Keith.” Lance chokes out my name, no doubt feeling exactly the same as I do, “Keith, those aren’t ghosts. Those are bodies. How are those-”

They move again. The whole family in a blink of an eye come forward by a good couple of feet without making a sound. Their necks are all tilted to the side at a sick angle, their mouths pulled into hard, toothy smiles.

“We need to go.” I say so quietly I don’t know if Lance even heard me, but it doesn’t fucking matter. We both stumble back, neither willing to turn our backs on the corpse family watching us with their dead eyes. I’ve never been so unnerved in my life, my hands trembling at my sides.

Lance breaks into a run first, swinging around on his heel and bolting up the hallway and I’m right behind him because fuck it, I don’t care, we just have to _get out we have to get out_. There is something so incredibly wrong here and somehow, the living dead family is just the beginning of it.

Lance throws himself against the front door, yanking it open and stumbling out onto the porch and I’m right behind him still, grabbing the doorknob and pulling it shut behind me- through the crack in the door, I see the family again, barely a foot from me and the terror is so real, so paralyzing, that I barely notice the burning against the palm of my hand on the doorknob until the door is securely shut. I yank my hand away with a gasp, tripping over my own feet and catching myself on the porch railing rather than landing on my ass. I take a moment, and then I turn around and lean over the railing to throw up into the flowerbed below it, heaving so hard that my back is aching and my shoulders are singing with tension. I hear Lance breathing in deeply, huffing the way you do when you’re trying to stop yourself from blowing chunks and then his hand is on my back, rubbing in circles to help me through it.

I eventually sag against the railing, exhausted and still shaking with exertion but feeling less queasy and the smell of vomit is a relief from the smell of dead bodies and the burning in my throat helps to anchor me as much as Lance’s hand on my back does.

There is a searing, throbbing pain in my hand and I blink hard and lick my lips before daring to turn my hand over and look at my palm.

“Holy fuck, dude.” Lance says over my shoulder, grabbing me by the wrist to inspect my hand- it’s burned. There are bits of black from how fucking badly my skin is charred. The burn is about the size of a dollar coin, and within the circle there are clearly, perfectly drawn lines like I had held still and allowed someone to paint them there. It’s some kind of sigil. The only description my pain-addled brain can come up with is that it looks like some fucked up sort of trumpet, but it’s not that simple. I frown at it, panting still and trembling, and then I frown at Lance who looks washed out with concern. “Does it hurt?”

“Yeah,” I huff, and it does, but not as much as it should. “We need to go, Lance.”

“Yeah.” Lance agrees and he doesn’t let go of my wrist as I straighten up. He leads me down off the porch and across the lawn like a child and takes the keys from me because my hand is trembling so fucking violently now that I drop them twice trying to unlock the door. I don’t argue about who’s going to drive, walking around to the passenger side and waiting for the lock to pop and then I collapse into my seat and try to stop the fucking trembling. This is ridiculous.

I stare at the house as Lance backs out of the driveway and find that the more distance put between us and the house, the more the tension eases off of me, but that doesn’t say much because I’m still fucking thrumming with it by the time we’re driving back through central.

“I need to talk to Allura. I don’t know what that was.” I say, mostly just to fill the silence in the car and so that I’m busy, in some sense of the word. I press my hand hard against my thigh and try not to think about it. “That wasn’t a haunted house, that was…”

“Man, you’re telling me. Felt like I had just walked into the belly of the fuckin’ beast or something. I’ve never… Those were _bodies_ , man. Those were dead people.” Lance shakes his head, leaning back hard in his seat, one hand on the steering wheel while the other taps out a nervous rhythm on his leg. It’s an itch for a cigarette that I catch immediately, so I dig up my pack from the centre console and light one for me and one for him, passing it over wordlessly. He winds down the window a couple of inches and tries to pipe smoke out of it. I suck in nicotine until I’m dizzy, trying to scrape the taste of vomit out of my mouth and my throat.

“I’ll go and see Allura tomorrow. Get some answers.” I say around a hazy exhale, ashing my smoke in the cupholder. “Drop me home.”

“You sure? You can crash at mine again.” Lance says, glancing over at me and it says something about where my head’s at that his concern doesn’t piss me off. “I sure as fuck don’t want to be on my own after that.”

“You’ve got Hunk,” I say even though that is not what Lance meant at all. I’m used to being alone, though, and I find it easier to decompress and get my feelings out if I’m not being watched. Lance considers me for a moment longer, as long as he can while driving, before he seems to get it and agrees to take me home.

He pulls up at the curb outside of my building and we both get out of the car. He tosses me the keys and I shove them in my hoodie pocket, and then Lance slings an arm around me and pulls me into a tight, one armed hug that I relax into minutely, clapping him on the back a couple of times.

“Lemme know what you find out, and take care of yourself, Keith.” He says as he steps back and I dig my hands deep into my pockets and nod tightly. Lance is used to my walls going up, not taking it personally but also not giving me shit like he normally would. Instead he just hops down off the curb and jogs across the street, heading off to catch a bus to the other side of town so he can get home. I probably should have offered to drive him, but I’m pretty keen to just get into the safety of my apartment.

I turn the light on the moment I step through the door, closing it behind me and pressing my weight into the doorknob like it will seal it somehow, and then to feel doubly safe I go into my kitchen and dig through my drawers until I find a sharpie and above the lock on the door, I draw out a protection sigil as best I can with hands that yet to become entirely still. I toss the pen onto the bench, followed by my knife and my hoodie and then I shuck off my jeans, stripping off on my way into the bathroom.

A shower helps, but I find myself flinching, looking over my shoulder whenever I feel like I’ve had my back to one wall for too long. I feel like I’m being watched, but it’s not an unfamiliar feelings. Just because I’ve been seeing dead things my whole fucking life doesn’t mean that I don’t get scared and a little fragile about it all. It’s early in the evening but I’m exhausted, so I crawl into bed with my hair still wet and the lights still on, burying my face into the pillow determined to just shut down.

I don’t. I toss and turn for what feels like hours. I press my cheek into the pillow and slowly uncurl my hand to reveal the burn. It’s no longer charred, the lines instead now pink and fresh, tiny blisters peppered around the lines. My gut twists. The brun throbs.

I can’t shake the feeling that Lance and I are in real fucking danger this time.

 


	2. Chapter 2

Unsurprisingly, I sleep terribly throughout the night and I wake up only a couple hours after sunrise, sweat-damp and feeling like I’m about to throw up. I lurch out of bed and make it to the kitchen sink in time to spit out bile and what little food I have in my stomach in the first place, panting and trying not to breathe in the nasty stench of stomach acid. I blindly find the faucet and turn it on, drinking down a couple of handfuls of water before straightening up.

I feel a little better, but there’s a dull throbbing behind my eyes that threatens to turn into a migraine if I’m not careful. Still, I make a cup of coffee and manage to get down a piece of toast before I shower and get ready to head out, layering up a sweater with a hoodie and a coat- I’m cold. Really, really cold. But I need to go and see Allura because the brand in my hand is still there, miraculously healed up with all of the blisters that had been forming last night now completely healed and gone. There’s still a dull throbbing, but it’s not how such a fresh burn should be reacting.

Allura’s place is within walking distance and I figure some fresh has gotta be good for me, so I leave my car where it’s parked and shove my hands deep in my pockets as I jog across the road and start up the block in Allura’s direction. The sun is out in full for the first time in a good week and its warmth, which isn’t reaching me, is raising up the stench of the city; piss and stale beer and the general grime that comes with the area. I swallow down the feeling like I’m going to throw up again, tucking my chin down into the collar of my coat.

My phone vibrates against the back of my hand so I dig it out of my pocket; Lance. I answer, shoving my phone between cheek and shoulder so I can keep my hands warm.

“Hey, what’s up?”

“Just checkin’ in, man. Did you get much sleep last night?” Lance says down the line, his voice a little raspy, so it was obvious he had as rough a night as I had.

“I slept, but it was shit.” I sniff, hopping the curb and crossing the street. I shiver and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. “I’m heading to Allura’s now. That mark is still on my hand.”

“Whereabouts are you? I’ll catch up.”

“I’m cutting through the park now, you don’t-...” I trail off and slow down my steps as I notice that there is something  _ wrong _ around me. I can hear Lance calling down the line, asking me what’s going on, but hold my phone away from my ear as I strain to listen to my surroundings. I don’t hear anything. As in,  _ anything _ . No traffic, no birds, no nothing. The park is completely devoid of noise and movement. There’s no one else but me around. 

My hand is burning. I yank it out of my pocket to stare down at the brand on my palm which seems the same as it had before, except it is  _ burning _ and I’m having to grind my teeth together so that I don’t scream. Lance is still yelling down the line when my hand slowly starts to tremor, and then the tremor becomes more of a violent shaking and I drop my phone so that I can grab my wrist and try to stop it but instead my whole arm starts to shake until I feel a hard tug in my fingers, down my palm, catching in my wrist and I’m ripped forward, my feet whipped out from under me so that I’m being dragged through the grass, trying to dig my heels into the dirt while clawing at my own wrist like I might be able to dislodge whatever it is that’s got its hold on me.

I’m dragged all the way into a small copse of trees that line one side of the park, my wrist being pinned to the trunk of one of the leafless trees. 

_ Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck. _

I twist around until I can get my feet against the tree and I press my weight into it trying to get free until my legs are straining from the exertion and my wrist hasn’t moved an inch. I scream out in frustration but the sound barely makes it through my teeth; no one can hear me. I exhale hard and drop my legs down, twisting around to face out into the collection of trees, searching for anything to explain what the fuck is going on. There’s a flicker of movement to my left and I watch, fucking helplessly, as the earth is slowly pushed up, crumbling around something that is emerging from beneath it. A mud-caked hand flops out from the dirt, huge, thick fingers digging into the grass. Following that was a broad and rounded shoulder and faceless, blocky head. I give my wrist another hard, useless tug before using my free hand to grab my knife. My grip is white-knuckled and I wonder how much good I’ll be while I’m immobile and one-armed. Another mound of dirt shifts to my right and my chest tightens with panic.

“I know who you are.” The words come in the form of a gravelly voice outside of my own head. I bite into the inside of my cheek and slowly tilt my head up to find who it is that’s speaking to me. The thing perched up in the tree is humanoid, except for it’s insanely exaggerated facial features; its huge square jaw and block nose, its ears sticking out from the sides of its head and its massive, blunt teeth which its lips peel back to expose. It doesn’t look like it should be able to hold its head upright but it does, grinning down at me.

“I don’t know you.” I say, trying to sound snarky but I’m choking around the lump of dread in my throat. The creature tips its head to one side in weird, jerky motions with the grin never faltering. 

“Demon killer. Hell is full of your enemies.” The creature croaks like it’s a fucking pack a day smoker. I just scowl up at the creature and try desperately to think of how the fuck I’m going to get out of this. There are golems slowing raising out of the fucking earth, the mud caking them dropping away to expose tar-slick bodies which is a smell I  _ hate _ and a smell that permeates the air all around me. “You’re going to meet them again soon.”

The creature drops down from the tree, landing on my legs so hard that I scream, but I guess my survival instincts kick in because despite the pain and the screaming, I swing my free hand up towards the creature’s head, planning to plunge my knife deep into it’s fucking brain. It catches my wrist before I can make impact and it squeezes until I can  _ feel _ my bones creaking under its grip, threatening to break and my knife drops from my grip lamely. The thing tsk’s at me and I swallow hard, my eyes darting back and forth as I try to think, think think  _ think or you’re going to fucking die _ but nothing comes. Even if I got away from what I can only assume is the demon who left this brand on my hand, I would have to go up against a growing number of golems.

This is not how I thought I would go out, but I’m also not particularly surprised.

My knife gets flung across the dirt, out of reach, and in an instant, the creature wraps its hands around my throat and I try to gasp around the growing pressure on my windpipe but the air doesn’t quite reach my lungs. The panic booms through me and I claw at the creature’s wrist lamely, uselessly, tearing up grey flesh but it doesn’t make a difference. I squeeze my eyes shut so that at the very least this thing’s face isn’t the last thing I see before I die. I try to think of my friends instead and the tears pricking at my eyelashes are as much from that as it is from my desperate struggle to breathe. I feel hot and there’s an disgusting taste burning the back of my throat and coating my tongue, something like blood and rot. My heart is rabbiting in my chest around my straining lungs and I’m going to pass out I must be close to passing out and then I’m going to  _ die-- _

When I’m released I cough so hard I throw up, flopping down onto my side like a ragdoll and it’s an effort to roll over onto my stomach, spluttering and kicking up dirt as I gasp, gulping air down into my lungs until I’m dizzy and lightheaded, so much so that I barely notice the fact that I’m no long being fucking choked, my hand is no longer pinned to the tree and the demon is gone. I can’t get my arms up under me. I can’t focus enough to find out what the fuck is going on so I just lie there in the dirt, my head pounding and my lungs burning until someone is grabbing me and rolling me over onto my back. Lance comes into my blurry line of vision, scowling deeply out of concern as he looks me over before sliding an arm around my shoulders and dragging me up into a sitting position. I flop my head down onto his shoulder and try to listen to him as he walks me through learning how to breathe again. 

“Holy fuck, man.” Lance eventually sighs, resting his head against mine. “I thought you were dead.”

“Me too.” I murmur. I’m exhausted now, slumping further down so that Lance has to carry my weight. “Where the hell did you come from?”

“The moment you stopped answering me on the phone, I booked it. You idiot. The fuck were you thinking?” He says but with no real heat in his tone. He fists his hand into the back of my coat and hauls me up onto my feet and I nod a little when he gestures to ask if I can keep myself upright. 

“Didn’t have a choice, man.” I say with a flimsy smile and I wander over to pick up my knife and put it back in its sheath before Lance leads me out from the copse of trees. “This brand on my hand… The demon used it to drag me over here. More reason to get fucking rid of it.”

“Yeah, no shit. Hopefully Allura’s got some answers, cause I don’t think that asshole’s gonna go down easy. I think I freaked him out, but that’s all. He let you go more like… Because he’s after both of us, maybe. I guess? I don’t know.” Lance sighs, rubbing at the back of his neck. “Just glad you’re not dead.”

“Thanks, Lance.” I say, smiling a little more genuinely this time and he socks me playfully in the shoulder. I roll my eyes and try to ignore the pain in my throat everytime I breathe.

Allura buzzes us into her building and we take the elevator up to her floor and she’s already standing in the doorway as we step out into the hall. Her gentle smile quickly shifts to concern when she sees me, sees the bruises already forming on my neck and she comes to me rather than waiting for me to reach her.

“ _ Keith _ -” She exhales, tilting my head back to look at my neck, running her fingers lightly over the marks. “What happened? This looks terrible.”

I sigh heavily, reaching to move her hands away. “It’s only the beginning.”

Allura makes us all tea and we sit around her kitchen table, spewing out all of the events that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. The fucked up house, the demon and golems that had attacked me in the park. She had frozen when I opened my hand to expose the brand on the palm of my hand. I shift uncomfortably in my seat and she hesitates before taking my hand in hers, leaning forward as she traces the tip of one finger over the raised skin. 

“You boys sure know how to get yourselves into trouble…” She sighs and when she doesn’t have an immediate, adverse reaction to the brand, she touches it properly, dragging her thumbs across it and I feel the prickle over my skin as she tries to dig up any information she can, her brow knitted in concentration. Eventually she pulls her hands away and instead grabs her phone and takes a photo of the mark and once she’s done I retract my hand, dropping it down into my lap. “Whoever put it there was clever about it. I can’t find out much about it; I’ll have Coran look it up, though. Find out who’s seal it is and then we should be able to make a plan of attack.”

“Thanks.” I say, morose, against the rim of my mug. Lance chews at his nail next to me, the atmosphere heavy.

“Keith, you should get some rest. Take the guest room, get some sleep.” Allura says after a moment, taking my mug from me because I’m clearly not committed to finishing my drink and she clears away hers as well. I nod a little and get up, heading down the hall to the spare room. Allura always has it made up nice, used to people crashing at her place. More than once she’s had me shown up a little fucked up and in need of rest. I shrug off a few layers until I’m down to just my t-shirt and jeans, checking myself in the mirror before climbing into bed.

The bruises on my neck are already clear as day, perfect marks of fingers that had dug into my skin, slight nicks from the creature’s nails, the blood now dried into the wounds. I suppose it’s a good thing that I don’t have a day job, because I would hate to have to explain this to co-workers. Guess it’s a good thing I’m single, too. I sigh and rub at my neck and collapse into bed, wrapping the covers tightly around me as I turn onto my side and curl up in a little ball of self-pity.

It’s easy to sleep at Allura’s. I know it’s safe here. There’s nothing dumb enough in all of Hell to dare enter her home, so I fall asleep quickly and deeply.

When I wake up it’s dark out which means I’ve slept the whole damn day. I can hear the sound of the TV, muffled so that I can’t make anything out, just noise. It’s early in the evening and my mouth tastes gross the way it does after a long sleep, but I guess I feel a little better than before, aside from the pain in my neck. I shrug my sweater back on before leaving the room, heading out into the lounge where Allura has the TV running, but she’s in the kitchen making dinner. I shuffle in to make coffee.

“Lance gone?” I sniff, leaning back against the counter as I wait for the coffee maker to start gurgling to life.

“Yeah, he had afternoon classes. He got a little sleep before he went.” Allura says with a smile as she stirs at the contents of a pot on the stove. It smells fucking good. “How are you feeling?”

“Sore.” I admit with a lopsided smile that cracks around my next admission, “freaked out.”

Allura sets aside the wooden spoon she’s stirring with and crosses over to me, pulling me into a gently hug that I don’t return, but I do press my face down into her shoulder. She sighs into my hair, rubbing between my shoulder blades. “You’re alright. You’re okay. Lance got you out of there.”

“I know,” I mumble, turning my cheek against her shoulder. “That’s the thing. He was completely outnumbered, he could’ve gotten himself killed. And now whatever’s after me is after him, too. I don’t want him to be doing this shit anymore, Allura. He should just be a normal fuckin’ college student where the biggest drama is finals and when he’ll get the balls to tell Hunk he likes him.”

Allura laughs quietly, squeezing me tight before she lets me go, returning to her cooking. “Mm, perhaps. But you can’t make that call for him, Keith. This is not an easy lifestyle to get out of, and Lance likes knowing he’s doing good.”

“I dragged him into it.” I say, determined to hold onto this and the guilt that comes along with it. I bite hard into my bottom lip and turn away, grabbing down a mug to pour the coffee. “I fucked up his life.”

“He doesn’t seem to mind.” Allura points out, amusement soft in her tone and I scrub at my face. “If he regretted it, he’d say something. Lance knows how to raise a complaint.”

“Mm. I guess.” I reluctantly concede, and even then it’s lip service. Allura knows that, but she lets it slide and instead tells me to set the table for dinner. The conversation lightens up while we eat but the feelings still nag at me, this guilt that has been building up steadily over the past couple of years. I guess it was inevitable, but it still feels shitty.

After dinner I shower and Allura lets me borrow a pair of pyjama bottoms that are covered in bunny rabbits, but thankfully I’m not so set in my masculinity to be bothered about it. They’re comfortable and it means I don’t have to sleep in my jeans or my underwear, which is fine by me. It had been silently agreed upon that I would stay the night so that I was safe, essentially. We spend most of the evening watching TV and trying to think about something other than what had happening; we don’t have any more answers right now, Coran hasn’t come back to us with any information on the seal and that is about the only thing we have to go by. 

Despite sleeping the entire day, it’s not remotely difficult to fall back asleep the moment I’m in bed again. It’s a special kind of exhaustion that I feel all the time.

In the morning I wake up to the smell of bacon and the sound of Coran, loud and nasal as always. I groan and wriggle down under the covers a little more, but it’s not enough to block out the noise so I’m forced to get up. I pull on my sweater as I head down the hall and through to the kitchen, which is a hub of activity. Lance is here, too, drinking his coffee and talking to Coran in rapid exchange. I grab my mug from the night before and pour myself some coffee, giving the two noisy assholes serious side-eye. Lance grins at me, reaching over to shove me playfully.

“Hey, how ya’ doing?” He asks, and despite his glib way of talking, it was said with a layer of real concern. I watch his gaze coast down to the marks on my neck and I rub at them self-consciously. It hurts.

“I’m okay. Did you sleep alright?”

“Yeah, yeah. Crashed after doing a tonne of homework, slept solid.” Lance smiles a little softer and I nod and smile back before taking my coffee over to the dining table. Allura and Coran dish out breakfast and for about an hour we’re like a semi-normal family chatting over eggs and bacon. We decide no shop talk until after we’ve all eaten and woken up sufficiently. Once the table’s cleared and Lance and I have done the dishes, Coran lays out the research he was able to pull up. It’s not much, a couple of pages scattered across the table that I wasn’t particularly keen to look over. I keep my distance, leaning back against the kitchen counter as Coran starts to explain.

“So. The brand on your hand is the goetic seal of the demon Ronove- or Ronwe, but either would work, I suppose. It’s just a translation issue.” Coran says with a little bob of his head and Lance glances over at me at the same moment that I look over at him. “Ronove is the Marquis and Count of Hell, giving him nineteen legions which is what you would’ve seen coming up through the ground yesterday- since they were so fresh out of the earth, they were pretty easy to take down. The longer they’re out, though, the stronger they become.”

“Great.” Lance deadpans and I drop my gaze.

“He is a demon of languages, so letting him talk is a  _ bad _ idea and letting him know your name could be even worse. Other than that, though, he’s pretty standard issue. Susceptible to all the normal things; holy water, dead man’s blood, salt will bind him…”

“What about this brand on my hand? Why do I have it?”

“-- _ That _ . That I can’t explain. I’ve never heard of it happening before and I can’t think of any purpose it can serve. We can only assume that when Ronove is sent back to Hell, the mark will disappear.” Coran frowns, an expression full of concern that I can’t look at, so instead I uncurl my hand and stare at the brand. I hope he’s right- I don’t want to be stuck with this fucking thing forever.

“So… What’s the plan? How do we find this fucker? Can we like, call him to us?” Lance cuts into the temporary silence, glancing between Coran, Allura and I with his eyebrows up. “I don’t really wanna wait for him to find us again. Or, find Keith again.”

“He’ll be at that house.” I say reluctantly, my eyes still on my hand rather than anywhere else. “I doubt we’ll have the element of surprise, but we know the house, sort of, so we won’t be completely blind going in.”

“... Are we going to have to deal with the, uh, occupants?” Lance asks, his expression a mix of reservations. I understand. That shit was terrifying. I sigh and shove my hand through my hair, scratching along my scalp as I think.

“If we do, remember that they’re already dead. Anything we have to do to them… They won’t feel it.” I say and it doesn’t fucking feel good. It leaves a bitter taste on the back of my tongue but, that’s how it is whether I like it or not. There’s a lingering silence and I grab my mug to pour myself another cup of coffee just so that I’m doing  _ something _ . I hear Lance sigh and scrub his hands over his face.

“Okay. We’ll get our shit together and head out in the afternoon, yeah?”

“Yeah, sounds good.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have been so sick lately i am suffering l ma o. But! Only one chapter left to go and I'm pretty sure I can get that done soon.   
> Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed it!  
> Kudos and comments are always appreciated   
> Love you guys :*

**Author's Note:**

> Thsank you SO MUCH Eugyne, not only for commissioning me, but for your constant support and for just bein' fucking rad, dude. I love this prompt. I love it so much that the story has managed to spin out into a three-chapter trip where this is just the tip of the ice burg.  
> As always when I dip into the supernatural, these boys are in for a rough ride.
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